Eminentoes/Fairlie Tales

...His oversized horn-rimmed glasses seemed to pull him ever forward with alcoholic magnetism...

...For what had he done in comparison to them...

...In one memorable essay in the Washington Post he compared a District of Columbia hotel chanteuse to Chartres Cathedral—and he wasn't joking, either...

...He died in tragicomic fashion...

...Well, all right...

...By the middle 1970s his drunkenness was habitual and his binges were excessive, so there was nothing left for Fairlie to do but attach himself to Martin Peretz and his newly purchased New Republic...

...From Peretz's standpoint, cheap credibility...

...This was sometimes illustrated in extravagant fashion...

...When I was employed at the New Republic for some years one of my irregular assignments was to "find Henry Fairlie...

...On the summer afternoon when President Carter announced that his buffoon-buddy Bert Lance would have to resign from office, a group of us stood around the television set and snickered: there were those cold blue eyes, all right, but where was that arrogant grin...

...Indeed, before there was an Alexander Cockburn or a Christopher Hitchens or even poor Peter Pringle, there was Henry Fairlie...

...This was Washington on the evening of Jimmy Carter's Inauguration, and Henry Fairlie, like the hundreds of happy Democrats squeezed into the Palm, was very pleased indeed...

...A handful of short, hastily written potboilers, a boxful of reviews...

...in humble irrelevance or vindictive obscurity he found common cause...

...He has nothing to say and he says it with aplomb...

...As we sat and ate fish, he bobbed to the left and careened to the right...

...In Fairlie's case it was a question of debt...

...Like many a chastened Englishman washed up on these shores, he found himself at the doorstep of Kay Halle, the Georgetown Anglophile and Cleveland mercantile heiress who had once sought to lure Randolph Churchill into matrimony...

...The comparison, naturally, was despairingly unfavorable...

...From Fairlie's point of view, convenience, drink, and a pocketful of cash...

...In fairness, I suppose Fairlie guessed I knew the awful truth: he spoke of his contemporaries in England—Paul Johnson, Sir Geoffrey Howe, and many others—with the singular malicethat envy requires...

...His tie was askew and his bony hands shook like a frightened mouse...

...I nearly expected him to collapse and do a split, or double over in a pratfall, then tip his hat courteously to the wall or the coatrack...

...Philip Terzian is editor of the editorial pages at the Providence Journal...

...He told one young woman he had once been known throughout the British Isles as "England's greatest lover...

...I soon memorized the three or four addresses where he stored his famous underwear...

...That night among the Carterites in 1977 he weaved from clique to coterie—nobody knew who he was—and settled on William Shaw-cross...

...Marriage is the usual expedient, or siphoning from a trust fund...

...A dozen years before he could still lurch and catch his fall, but age had overtaken him...

...But even Fairlie lost faith in Jimmy Carter, at long last, and he ultimately became a kind of anglicized Bill Moyers, in whining admonition: his only diagnosis for the failure of the left was the sickness of the country...

...Here was a figure hovering around the office who had begun his career stalking Winston Churchill, not Ralph Nader...

...A mouthful of salmon couldn't stop the imprecations...

...This minor detective skill was deeply resented, of course, and my reward for this onerous duty was a copious pile of long, handwritten letters examining my various defects...

...This, like his well-advertised affection for Dylan Thomas, was probably the high-water mark of Carter's erudition...

...He who had begun as a Tory acolyte of Harold Macmillan ended his life as a self-professed socialist, embracing Michael Harrington, nipping at the heels of William F Buckley...

...For some reason now forgotten, I mentioned Malcolm Muggeridge, and he exploded with a roar: Muggeridge, he declared, was a lecher, a drunkard, and a fraud...

...Like so many foreign observers of the past two hundred years, Henry Fairlie derided and disdained what he couldn't comprehend while falling into puppy love with occasional individuals...

...He lurched about the Palm Restaurant bar, flopping this way and that like Buster Keaton in a windstorm...

...Eleven days later Henry Fairlie was dead, age 66...

...He was never happier than when he could compare his adopted country with the Britain of his heyday, or with Periclean Athens...

...Fairlie in the New Republic was a thumb in the eye of the Washington Post...

...He invited Shawcross to dine, but Shawcross fixed him with an agonized look, and abruptly turned away...

...And like most confidence men, his powers of flattery were dangerously potent: he wrote light verse in honor of Peretz, he persuaded Joseph Kraft to share his suffering spouse, he talked to Katharine Graham like a profligate nephew, to waitresses THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 29 and typists he knelt on bended knee like an aged buccaneer...

...He waved his hand imperiously and shook his head with violence, the morsels of salmon now escaping from his lips and tumbling to the tablecloth: "No, I cannot take Malcolm Muggeridge seriously, and neither should you...

...Miss Halle, who was many years older than Mr...

...By the early 1960s his accumulation of unpaid bills and angry patrons was painful enough...

...the skin stretched over his knuckles was spotted and translucent...

...In another life he might have written a real book, or a political biography...

...He had interviewed the candidate on an airplane during the primaries, and Governor Carter, who could occasionally be shrewd, had referred to Clarendon's History of the Rebellion in subsequent conversation...

...He certainly should have done what Alistair Home accomplished—and his churlish review of Horne's life of Harold Macmillan is painfully self-revealing...

...Whence do they come, and why do they remain...

...The past tense made it poignant: another time he spoke of the pleasures of chaste affection, lying together in bed "with one's underwear on...

...It was, for the most part, a displeasure cruise for him...

...He was scraped off the pavement and delivered to the same hospital where 70-year-old Ronald Reagan had survived a bullet wound in the chest...

...We know where they set out, but they cross the Atlantic for cash...

...Like many public moralists his standards were strictly in principle: he had once been jailed in Britain for failure to pay alimony, and his childrenand grandchildren were strangers at best...

...Still in debt, still sitting in judgment, still easily angered and flattered with a drink, he finished his career in a Peretz-subsidized flat, lapping occasionally in other directions, biting each generous hand...

...an awful lot of people go very far on rather little...

...But he stayed on his feet, and kept circling the room...

...Fairlie, offered a copious bosom for weeping, and a checking account as well...

...Henry Fairlie had once been infatuated with politics, but now he was exploring the American soul...

...Fairliethen swirled and stood facing me: I accepted the invitation...

...America had its assets.rr hese usually took a female form: 1 the wife of a sometime CBS producer, a West Coast health quack, an unpublished novelist...

...I still have them, and they are as sadly amusing today as they ever were in the past...

...but having referred to his onetime lover Antonia Fraser on television as a whore, he became a fugitive from the libel laws in 1965...

...And there, in the pool of precocious young men, he found his final nest...

...but Fairlie was an instant convert, and for a long time after would brook no carping about the man he called his hero...

...A s it happens, his fatal encounter with a banana peel was just across the street from the Palm Restaurant bar...

...The next morning Fairlie thumb-tacked a photograph of a chastened Jimmy Carter on the bulletin board, and admonished his colleagues to refrain from such cruelty: this, he said, was "the face of Auschwitz," and we were the SS...

...On a brisk February afternoon, drunk as usual, he stumbled and fell on the sidewalk outside the New Republic of-fices...

...the Palm was in stormy seas...

...he would catch himself in mid-plunge, stamp his feet on the floor, push his glasses up his nose, and snort...

...Even today the resident political culture is thin in the nation's capital...

...He slipped quickly and easily into the senior Georgetown set: Kay Halle's neighbor Katharine Graham offered succor at the Post, and the pattern of the parasite was successfully established...

...What was the attraction...

...It lasted a quarter-century...

...In a sense Henry Fairlie's contempt for political Washington was confirmed by his own renown...